926 THE EARTH-CLOSET SYSTEM. 



Crimea. Thirdly, these experiments show very plainly how 

 seriously wetting impairs the power which earth and ashes have 

 of retaining gases in their pores ; and this, which the rationale 

 of their operation, as ordinarily taught, would have led us to 

 anticipate, has been practically confirmed by Dr. Mouat's actual 

 experience of the working of earth-closets in India. (See ' Report 

 on Gaols of Lower Provinces,' p. 144, 1868.) Now 'slops,' or 

 fluid refuse of all kinds, must be got rid of somehow and somc^ 

 way; and either they are thrown upon the earth or ash 'con- 

 servancy,' where it exists, and, producing the physico-chemical 

 solecism to which I have alluded, they reproduce the horrid Man- 

 chester 'middens* (q.v., or, by preference, Mr. George Greaves's 

 account of them in the * Quarterly Journal of Science '), or they 

 have a system of sewers to receive them, along which the solid 

 matters, little if indeed at all less noxious than they, might just as 

 well pass too. Fourthly, the double journey, in and out of town, 

 which earth must go through, is a great drawback upon the merits 

 which it may possess ; whilst the fact that coals do come into our 

 towns as it is may tempt us to advocate the employment of the 

 ashes they are converted into for the purposes in question. In the 

 house of the rich man, where the bodies producing refuse are not 

 very greatly out of proportion, or, possibly enough, only equal in 

 number to the fires producing ashes, and where a separate system 

 for liquid refuse is but a trifling item in the expense of house- 

 building, an ash ' conservancy ' is a possibility. But the quantita- 

 tive considerations, to which I have just alluded, show a priori that 

 it is as inapplicable in theory to the needs of a poor population as, 

 I believe, actual trial of it on the large scale has shown, and always 

 will show, it to be in fact. 



